While kind of geeky, but not necessarily Mac related, The Daily Plate is an incredible site to help you eat healthy and stay in shape. So why bring it up on Geeky Mac? Because I am sure that most of us spend more than a fair amount of time in front of our Macs nearly every single day. Getting the right amount of exercise and eating healthy are extremely important parts of life, that I feel, us “geeks”, often overlook. The great thing about The Daily Plate, is the fact that it is all Web 2.0 style! This makes the site fun, interactive and incredibly social.

Here is how The Daily Plate works in a nutshell; you sign up for a FREE account, search for what you have eaten, and add it to your plate. Here you can track your food and exercise, as well as nutrition consumption. But The Daily Plate does much more than just that.

Lets walk through a typical day while using The Daily Plate.
First thing we need to do is establish our goal. Chances are most of us are going to want to loose weight, but we can also maintain, and gain weight if we feel so inclined. For the purposes of this walk though, lets say that we would like to loose one pound per week. How are we going to do this? Well eating right and exercising of course. But how do we manage of of this?

This is where The Daily Plate really helps us out. So we have set our goal (to loose one pound a week) and we are ready to start our first day.

Well how do we know what we need to do to loose the weight? The Daily Plate will ask us for our weight. Here it will calculate how many calories we can consume to achieve our goal. The other really cool feature is the animated line chart, which tracks our weight loss progress.

Now that we know how much we can eat, we need to track what we do eat. Simply search The Daily Plate database for whatever you have eaten and add it to your plate. The Daily Plate has an incredibly large database of food items for you to select from. And in the rare event that you cannot find what you ate, you can add your item to their database. Beyond just the search, The Daily Plate will also recommend other items similar to what you searched for, that may be a better choice. This is really a great way to decide what you want to eat.

Okay, off to the gym to get some exercise. You can add exercise to your plate the same way that you add food. Search for the exercise or activity, and enter the pertinent details. The Daily Plate will automatically tell you how many calories you burned. You can also enter this information manually, if say you used a machine that already calculated the calories for you. Now the calories burned will be subtracted from the calories that you added to your plate via food. This is especially nice, because now you can view your NET and GROSS caloric consumption.

Now the hard part, keeping up with it.
While obviously the hardest part of any diet is to stick with it, and for that matter track it. This is why I really like The Daily Plate. It makes it fun, for the most part. While exercising can be a chore it is very rewarding to see how it all comes together on this fabulous site. It keeps you motivated, and makes you feel guilty when you slip up. And frankly, the best part, is knowing that I have to make a wise decision about what I am going to eat. I know that I have to go to the site and add it to my plate. And I don’t want to go over my calories and be disappointed.

So overall The Daily Plate is a great resource to help you “loose weight web 2.0 style.” And as anyone who takes their exercise and diet seriously, logging is an everyday chore. The Daily Plate makes it fun and easy. While the site does have a few limitations, it looks like there is plenty of room to grow, and I have seen new features added fairly regularly. So sign up today!